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Friday, June 1, 2007

Oops, A Frustrating Week

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Our houseguest is still staying with us even though it’s been a week since she was spayed. My son may be taking her home this weekend. We aren’t really certain on that. And we aren’t certain on how long she will be gone when she does go home. Seems that my son’s girlfriend has decided that she doesn’t like the fact that Chloe is one-fourth pit bull. She is ignoring the half of shar pei that her DNA contains, and is focusing solely on the pit bull. Over the long holiday weekend she went on the internet and printed off sheet after sheet of incidents where pit bulls have attacked people. She says that the first time Chloe so much as barks at one of the kids or at her dog she is out of there. (The dog, not the girlfriend) Excuse me, but Chloe hasn’t shown any signs of aggression in the past other than the time she growled when my sons girlfriends dog tried to mount her. So why all of a sudden, is Chloe getting ultimatums? She has been a perfect little houseguest in the week that she has been here. I think this is all part of the universe’s plot to conspire against me and ruin my upcoming vacation. I firmly told my son that vacation is in two weeks and neither he nor anyone else is going to ruin it for us.

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Since the son and his girlfriend have been on the warpath with each other, Jas spent the night with the hubster and I on Wednesday. If it looks like she has blue teeth in the picture above, it’s because she does. No, she isn’t turning into a smurf. She was chowing down on a blue fruit roll-up. We delegated the hubster to Jas’s little twin bed for the night so Jas could sleep with me in our room and watch TV. After she watched her show she turned off the TV, told me she was going to dream about laying on the beach, and promptly went to sleep. The next morning she told me this long and involved story of her dream and how she dreamed she was swimming, playing Putt Putt Golf and having a picnic breakfast on the beach. Yes, Jas is ready to go on vacation. The next two weeks will be the longest two weeks of her life while she waits for our vacation to start.

Meanwhile the hubster and I are making final preparations for the aforementioned vacation. I am doing my part by purchasing additional beach towels, sand buckets and swim rings. And he is doing his part by reserving hotel rooms. Last night we realized he had screwed up on the stay in Carolina Beach NC. He had booked one less night than we needed. He proceeded to spend the next thirty minutes stressing about how it could have happened. He even tried blaming it on me because a couple of weeks ago I had nixed the idea of spending the entire eight days at Carolina Beach, opting instead for four. The point is we had both agreed on staying in Carolina Beach four days but he only booked three days. Finally I had enough of his ranting over how it could have happened. I told him to stop wondering how and start working on correcting the problem. He called and within two minutes had the missing night tacked on to the room reservation. It’s just like a man to spend thirty minutes stressing over something that takes two minutes to fix. Or rather, it’s like my man. I am left wondering if he has always been this annoying and I didn’t notice, or is this a recent behavior trait?

If truth be told, I have been having an annoying, frustrating week. If something could go wrong, it did go wrong. I won’t go into all of the many gruesome and gory details, like bad haircuts, stupid children that I must have dropped on their head when they were babies, barking dogs with odor problems, redneck neighbors and much more, but suffice it to say, I’ll be glad when this week is over. Each day seems to bring it’s own challengers. Take for instance, yesterday. I found out that when amazon.com carries your book, it sets its own price for the book, following a particular formula. That’s all fine and dandy, but they force the book to be sold at their particular price everywhere that it is sold. Again, I thought no problem. Then I found out the price they are trying to force the book to be sold at. $21! I am NOT happy about that! I am searching for a way around the problem. Since the ISBN has already been ordered the distribution package may be too late to change. The only recourse I can see at this point is to delay giving final approval on the book which means it stays at the $13.98 price until I click on the approval button. Therefore I am holding off approving the dummy copy for at least a week. So head on over to Lulu within the next 7 days to get your copy before the price goes up. And afterwards, I would recommend buying it from the Lulu site or from me instead of amazon.com. In fact, if you would like to buy a copy of the book and want it autographed drop me an email. I will send you an autographed copy and you can just mail your check to me. If you don’t want an autographed copy my recommendation is to buy it from Lulu.com. The official address is:http://www.lulu.com/content/856802

This whole process has been a “learn by trial and error” experience. It has been an enormous amount of fun though. While I am still writing the no-named romance novel (I have five chapters completed), I had the most fabulous idea for another cookbook. I am not going to tell you what it is yet, but I will be working on it for the rest of the afternoon and in fact, most of the weekend. You’ll love it when you hear about it! For now though, you’ll have to remain in suspense. How do you keep a blog reader in suspense? Well...